Sage advice.

Acutally what I'm trying to do is protect against people chainging their tune later. Imagine someone signs up to a service and an aspect of that service - that is made very loudly clear in big red letters over the "sign up" button - is to give your personal info to someone else, or to publish your email address, or to inquire about your financial situation, or something sensitive like that.

Then, after you've done what they asked, they turn around say "I never asked you to do that. I'm suing."

You reply, "Sure you did - here's the proof, uh, um, wait a minute, I'm sure it have it here somewhere......"

I'm trying to concoct something to pull out of my hat to show.

This is not a trivial matter. Laws had to be changed to recognize a digital signature or a button press as a binding legal contract. Heck, the big news last year was that Panama finally revamped their contract laws for exactly that because without these changes e-commerce was effectively dead in Panama.

But for the lowly programmer trying to design a sign-up page and db so it serves his employer well, I've found little direction. Which surprises me - considering the pervasiveness of online sign-up forms, I half imagined that the recipe for a proof-positive electronic contract would be as well-defined a piece of industry zeitgeist as the signature is to paper by now, and to which I was the only ignorant party living in a cave. Maybe not?